Quest Software has unveiled a complete update of its solution portfolio for Microsoft SQL Server. Quest's SQL Server portfolio is built to tackle the challenges faced by SQL Server professionals across all key areas of database management. Paired with free access to SQLServerPedia, a redesigned, online educational resource, Quest has released updates to the following products for SQL Server: LiteSpeed, a backup and recovery solution; Capacity Manager for capacity trending and forecasting; Spotlight on SQL Server Enterprise, a tool for detection, diagnosis and resolution of performance issues in real time; Foglight Performance Analysis, a workload performance tuning and diagnostic tool; and Toad, a comprehensive development and administration tool.

Two key areas of advancement within the new version of LiteSpeed are enhanced compression capabilities and more granular levels of backup and recovery. Regarding this granularity, data can be backed-up and recovered at a wide range of levels including the entire database, database schema, specific tables, single table rows, database objects, or stored procedures. Another new feature is SmartDiff, a new patent-pending technology that enables just the daily database changes to be backed up. SmartDiff also enables users to store more than a terabyte of database backups on a single USB flash drive and provides even more flexible recovery options.

Regarding SmartDiff, Douglas Chrystall, chief technology officer of SQL Server Solutions at Quest Software, tells 5 Minute Briefing that "on any given day, only 1% to 5% of the data in a database may actually change and require backup. Hence, it is very inefficient to backup the entire database every day. It is much better to do an initial full backup of the database, and then just backup the changes to it on a daily basis. This is what SmartDiff does. It captures the transaction changes for a given day and then backs those up to the original file, thereby ensuring that a backup copy of the most recent database image always exists. This can reduce a backup for a full database that could take four to eight hours down to just a few minutes, and thereby saving processing power costs, DBA time, and other resources."

For more information about Quest Software and the new SQL Server Solutions, go here.